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The new Object palette is great. However, it can be used only on images.
When writing academic papers, every image has a caption. As long as the caption does not float together with the image, the new option becomes much less useful.
Also, currently, tables cannot float.

Making tables float will solve both problems, as the caption and image could go into a 1x1 table. Is this doable? Is there a workaround?
(I found one that is very complicated:
1. put the tables, figures, and captions in a different file
2. use screen capture to add the tables and figures back to the original document as images, together with their caption
3. add virtual targets to allow you to refer to the tables and figures even though they do not have titles anymore.
this works, but is so hard to maintain!)

I would also like to have the ability to float tables.

I'm not sure though that this should be a substitute for having dedicated figure captions that stay with their figures. Better to have both.

See this thread: http://forum.redlers.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2100

just want to second this - pictures usually do have captions, and they should float together.
I made the same point here some weeks ago: http://forum.redlers.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2067
hope we'll get this in 2.8

nalugu wrote:just want to second this - pictures usually do have captions, and they should float together.
I made the same point here some weeks ago: http://forum.redlers.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2067
hope we'll get this in 2.8

Well, OK but when you really "float" an image, then you can either set captions aside from text (so that captions don't float, or are linked up to the image - that would be a "text box"), or else if captions are just like any other piece of text ... they will float as well. So a decision will have to be made: treat a caption like just any other text, or treat it differently ("text box" or whatever other solution there could be).

It doesn't surprise me that the Redlers have opted for the "purist" approach of floating images over captions (meaning you can't glue a caption to a floating image): the image floats across text (including captions because those are also "text").

What people seem to really want is a way to place an image with it's caption together on a page, and have the main document text flow around this unit.

The standard image-handling and text wrapping tools in most word processors — exactly the ones that Mellel has just duplicated — are almost completely useless for this purpose. The "purity" in floating an image with no regard for the reasons that someone inserts an image into a document seems sterile. Quite disappointing.

Flowing text around an object probably required complex changes to the Mellel text formatting code, so I hope that this current implementation is a first baby step towards a useful implementation of figure handling.

DRM

I like how Papyrus approaches this: the caption is attached to the image and goes with it. But it can also be detached and moved to top, bottom or side, then reattached. When I did the page layout for the book three years ago, it simplified matters considerably. Automatic renumbering of the caption worked flawlessly.

This is one area where Framemaker got it right and everyone else is clueless. Framemaker had anchored frames. The frames could have graphics, text, tables or a mixture including embedded autonumbers.
The frames were anchored to a location in a given text flow but could float. Importantly any autonumbers in the anchored frame were updated based on where the anchor was.

The way Framemaker did it, you would add a text box to the anchored frame under the image and then put an autonumbered paragraph in the text box.


Floating just images is not what is needed for long structured documents like reports and books and academic papers. One needs to be able to embed autonumbers. This is a generic solution that leverages the full power of Mellel's autonumbers. Having special captions that float with the image is a kludge. Albeit if a generic solution is too hard
I will take a kludge for now, because floating images or worthless without captions.

Me too (I regard having the captions tied to the images as very important, since I almost never have images by themselves. The word "float" worries me a bit, however, because I prefer having images (and attached captions) in-line, not in a hovering cloud.